Recently Stray Gods the Roleplaying Musical came out with their first DLC: Orpheus on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, and Nintendo Switch. The story follows a recently back from the dead Orpheus as he tries to find his place in the world with help from our lovable Hermes.
The game has the same cool art and great voice acting as the original, but lacked the emotional depth. Where with Stray Gods one play through was simply not enough, Orpheus didn’t keep drawing me back the same way.
In the end, I think it was just a lack of time spent with the characters. I think the DLC could’ve been better as a fully fleshed out sequel game rather than a short mini story.
The quality of the game is still fantastic. If you enjoyed the general gameplay of Stray Gods then this is the same. If you are unfamiliar, the game is a visual novel musical.
During the course of songs you make choices to take the song in a variety of different directions. My favorite song by far had to be one during a scene of Orpheus trying out speed dating. It was light, fun, and you can take it a lot of different directions with each new person.
I did like that you can use past save data to influence some conversations. I really wish that there was an option to choose what those were. For example, I didn’t have a save file that left Orpheus on the throne in Hades so I would have to play through Stray Gods again in order to have that happen just to see how things go in this DLC when that choice was made. I don’t mind playing through Stray Gods again, but there’s only so many save files.
On the whole, the game felt unsatisfying to me. The story was so rushed because it was just a DLC that by the time I got to the end I felt like I hadn’t really gone anywhere. Literally the first play through I had I got to the ending and was taken aback that that was it.
It felt like to me Orpheus didn’t really go on much of a character journey and his relationship with Hermes didn’t really do much. Hermes for their part just kind of directs different people to Orpheus to help him, so while they are very supportive and clearly care what happens to Orpheus, Hermes felt like they were trying to be more hands off.
I would have loved to have a scene with Orpheus and Hermes really doing things together, maybe even a song between the two with Hermes showing Orpheus all the things that the modern world has to offer. I do also think a major character was missing, Persephone. I know they hashed things out in their song in Stray Gods, but I would have loved her to make an appearance in all this.
This brings me to my main thought, this would have been a phenomenal sequel to Stray Gods rather than a DLC. Following Orpheus’ journey played out across an entire game would have alleviated the story problems I had.
At the end of Stray Gods, Persephone mentions that things are changing in Hades which would give a good launching point for this new story. Exploring both Hades and the modern world with Orpheus would have been so much fun and could have some really interesting story moments.
And let’s face it, to have Orpheus burned by the god Hades just to be the one to save his realm, possibly with the goddess who killed Hades, is the kind of story the Orpheus in this DLC is looking for.
At the end of the day, the quality of this game is just as good as Stray Gods. Everything there was spot on, the story was just a bit lackluster for me.
While I’ll go back and replay Stray Gods many more times, this DLC just didn’t grab me in the same way. Orpheus is a great legend who deserved a full length game in the end. I would give this a 7/10 because the quality of art, voice work, and music helps offset some of the other problems I had.
